Instead, as written, "The Lost Virginity Tour" is as clumsy as a first time, and not nearly as endearing. I mentioned the jokes were accompanied by all but the characters pausing and asking, "GET IT?"; but the script was equally uncomfortable with entrusting its audience to suss out themes on their own.

In the fifth scene (the play starts with a baking club meeting at the retirement community, then jumps into a series of four road trip stops, one for each woman), the playwright twice repeats what I guess is the "moral" of the story, that all the women wish they'd waited until marriage like Rita did. Twice! And with all the subtlety of a Saturday-morning PSA about recycling inserted between cartoons.

The script strives for heavy drama at times but does none of the work to earn it. It wants us to care about this friend group, but the characters are so busy quipping at each other that there's no room for true personalities to emerge. We're shown the women's histories through their virginity tours, where they each recollect their first time, but the script is hardly written in a way that allows us to see them in a new light, illuminated by the past. The characterization is so thin, and the monologues so unrooted, that they have all the emotional relevance of a Wikipedia plot summary. And once they have the heartfelt moment to cap off the experience, the women exit for the next stop on the tour, and by the time that scene begins, they've completely forgotten about whatever realization they just had, at least as far as their behavior and motivations are concerned.

In the first act, after learning that Kitty's high-class, white parents blackmailed her into breaking up with her first love because he was Mexican, the four women rescue Kitty from her guilt by surrounding her and forcing her to chant, "I forgive Kitty!" with them.

In the second act, Viola's lifelong trauma over having been raped is also made better with a group hug.

The script at least has the good sense to not make these feel-good "come to Jesus" moments perfect in their outcomes—Viola continues to express heartbreak and self-blame—but they are the emotional climaxes of their respective scenes. They are presented dramatically as the resolutions to the women's anguish, guilt, and torment.

The script wants us to believe that the power of friendship can truly heal any wound, but it happens so quickly, relies on relationships that are told to us rather than embodied, and the characters revert so quickly to exactly who they were at the top of the script (usually as soon as the next scene begins) that nothing feels real. It all feels like hollow, artificial drama.

And not only do the characters not change, except to say, "I love you girls" and decide they're absolute BFFs, the script won't even properly name their conflicts after their big dramatic moments.

In Act 2, Kitty's monologue, she confesses that she broke up with her first love, a Mexican boy named Mario, under coercive pressure from her wealthy white parents. In Act 5, while the script has her trying to deliver some sort of moral, Nina describes this as "class warfare".

And in Act 4, Viola dramatically admits she was raped (downstage center, with a spotlight on her), but Nina's summary in Act 5 won't use that word, instead saying she was "sexually assaulted". Yes, that's accurate, but taken with the rest of the script, it doesn't merely feel like a different word choice, it feels like another example of this script's unwillingness to hold our gaze. Viola used the word "rape" for the bombshell dramatic moment in Act 4, but by Act 5, they've already hugged about it and moved on to Elaine's story—using the word again would highlight how nothing had actually been resolved!

It is certainly A Choice to, in the Year of Our Lord 2018, write a monologue delivered by a white woman in a cast of four white women about how her parents' racism hurt her, and not only give her a touching group healing beat but also refuse to ever feature or further explore Mario's story.

The road trip framing device is apt. These women are tourists to their own lives. They drop into an unfamiliar (to three of them) location, hear a story, and drink wine. Whatever the history, it only matters insomuch as it matters to them, and it will stop mattering by the time they get back to the interstate. Will Kitty try to make amends with Mario? Will Viola seek out her daughter Lori, who she gave up for adoption? Will Elaine look for her true love, Carl—especially when she learns he's still waiting for her?

The answer to all of these questions is "no", because "Lost Virginity Tour" is devoid of life outside of the four cast members. This is particularly apparent in Pentacle's production, where the only other humanoid figures are the AI-generated image of a friendly mechanic that flashes onto the backdrop for 15 seconds during a scene change, and the students in the AI-generated college campus backdrop, two of which were inexplicably Facebook Bitmojis. "Lost Virginity Tour" is written with a lonely solipsism masquerading as white female empowerment: no one exists except the Bake Club women, who, without fail, meet every opportunity to reach out to other humans with excuses and withdrawal.